Making sense of our ongoing social catastrophe. (An Orthosphere blog.)

September 25, 2013

The Secular Case Against Gay "Marriage"

Let us grant, for a moment, the left's prejudices regarding separation of church and state, and say that natural law is no basis for civil law. Can we still fashion a useful argument against gay "marriage"? The left, generally, says no: that there's no reason to oppose it outside of religious fundamentalism.

To the contrary, given even a modest appreciation for the purpose of law, even when you discard all religious context, there's still no good reason to endorse gay "marriage." Here's the five-step argument:

1. Laws are promulgated to serve the public interest.

2. The care and disposition of children is a matter of public interest.

3. Heterosexual unions have an innate tendency to produce children.

4. Therefore, society has an interest in heterosexual unions, and is within its rights to attach its impetus to them by way of marriage.

5. Homosexual unions have no innate tendency to produce children and therefore are not in the public interest. QED.

To this, the leftist may object, "But not all married couples have children." So? What is endorsed is the capacity for producing children. Not all people who get engineering degrees go on to practice engineering, either; no one imagines we ought to retroactively revoke engineering degrees financed in part with government student aid for that reason.

Or the leftist (betraying his nominalist prejudices) might argue, "But not all heterosexual couples are even fertile." Sure, but how is the state going to figure this out without running afoul of privacy protections (e.g., inquiring about the state of your uterus) or else making an arbitrary judgment (e.g., couples who are 33% fertile may marry but those who are 32% fertile may not). Hands off my body, dude!

Think of it this way. Why do we have a drinking age? To keep alcohol from falling into the hands of those who are not sufficiently mature to accept the responsibility of alcohol consumption. But how is the state going to assess maturity? Are they going to make you show up for a class, take a battery of psychological tests to assess your affective and cognitive maturity levels, make you wait 6-8 weeks while a group of grad students in psychometrics score them, report the results to the state, and then issue an endorsement to your driver's license to let you purchase alcohol? That'd be insane. We use age as a proxy, as there's a decent correlation between age and maturity. Likewise, there's a pretty decent relation of sex to fertility: in fact, sexual complementarity is a necessary (if insufficient) condition for procreation.

Ultimately, this comes down to: what is the reason for gay "marriage"? If there's no valid social reason for heterosexual marriage, the proper response is not to redefine marriage but to abolish it altogether. Promoting happiness or endorsing love or whatever is no compelling public interest: the state has no business legislating on anything as insubstantial as the whims of the human heart. Even if it were the case, as leftists say, that there were no good reason to oppose gay "marriage," there absence of a reason to oppose something is not itself a reason to support it.

Of course, there is no reason to support gay "marriage." The push for it is just the typical leftist scrabbling for limited resources by wedge minorities in the sunset of Western civilization.

From a natural law standpoint, no, I wouldn't. Science cannot affect a fundamental transformation in human nature. A man who get his penis turned inside out and shoved up into his body does not thereby become a woman, for instance. The fact that scientific intervention is needed to make it happen *as a matter of principle* is evidence enough that it is contrary to human nature.

From a civil law standpoint, well, I don't recognize a distinction between the two, so no, I still wouldn't support it. My point in posting this was simply to demonstrate that, contrary to leftists' claim, there is in fact at least one good reason to oppose gay "marriage" that doesn't rest on religious/philosophical/metaphysical claims, at least none more sophisticated than legal theory.

"The fact that scientific intervention is needed to make it happen *as a matter of principle* is evidence enough that it is contrary to human nature."

"Scientific intervention" is needed, say, to save your life by removing your appendix if it becomes infected. Is that contrary to human nature?

"My point in posting this was simply to demonstrate that, contrary to leftists' claim, there is in fact at least one good reason to oppose gay "marriage" that doesn't rest on religious/philosophical/metaphysical claims, at least none more sophisticated than legal theory."

You failed utterly. The legal status of marriage is about many other things besides reproduction. It's also a trite argument that has been floated many times before.

You'd be better off arguing on conservative grounds -- that we don't know what the effects of a radical change in the definition of marriage would be, and we shouldn't change something so fundamental to society without knowing what the effects would be. That at least is an argument that makes sense and doesn't rest on any sort of metaphysics, just caution.

If you can't defend your natural law positions, I certainly am not going to take the time to do it for you. Anyway, I thought the point of this post was to defend the ban on gay marriage without recourse to natural law -- says so right in the first sentence.

"Literally every benefit that accrues to marriage relates to the discharge of duties arising from its natural procreative end."

That is so obviously false that I do not know how to reply. Many people get married with no intention of reproducing; presumably they obtain some benefit from it.

Let's be honest here--the legal state of marriage is about who has the power to do what to whom. Most of civil government is all about who...whom.
We can talk all we want about how homogamy desacralizes marriage in the eyes of the population and increases the probability that people will game the systems and fray the social fabric, which is perfectly true. But in the final analysis, what matters in civil law is who has the power to do unto whom.

Tons of things about our system are based on the presumption that most people will be in nuclear families with a husband, a wife, and N children---especially our system of taxation. If you think homogamy is going to cause trouble, wait till you get a load of polygamy. What conservatives need to do is just say---privileging homogamy isn't in our interests, and aggressively punish their enemies. Allowing the fight to be conducted mostly on a plane other than that caters to the advantage of the side that controls the media (hint, not yours).

I'm not asking you to do it for me. I'm asking you to know what the hell you're talking about before you comment about it -- your objection (which related specifically to natural law, hence my reference to it) betrays your total ignorance of what natural law actually implies. Do your homework before having the temerity to argue with me on this; Feser's book is a good place to start. Further snottiness from you warrants a ban -- you are a guest at this blog. Know your place.

Yes, people benefit from marriage despite not having children. The fact remains that the benefits attached to marriage all have to do with its inherently procreative nature. There literally isn't one that doesn't. Everything from property rights to insurance coverage to changes in the way taxes are calculated all relate to establishing the conditions under which married men and women may discharge their procreative duties to one another.

Alright, I give up, there clearly doesn't seem to be enough of a common basis about what constitutes an argument to even have an discussion.

I have in fact skimmed Feser's book and was unimpressed. Your argument seems to be a condensed form of his, which to me just sounds like bald assertion of the thing to be demonstrated. I'm sure you see it differently. I don't think this is reconcilable so I will shut up.

OK, one last (fairly obvious) point -- gay couples can "procreate" the same way that infertile heterosexual couples, by adoption, artificial insemination, and possibly other technologies like the one I started with. I presume you don't object to these methods when hetero couples do it; so if gay couples do, they are fulfilling what you call "the inherently procreative nature" of marriage.